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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Robot Blood Bowl !

Don't despair coaches!

Pushy players pestering for more pitch time? Wannabe Stars showboating for the crowd instead of following your plays? Or maybe you're just tired of players who can't take a boot to the face or chainsaw to the gut but you just can't stomach the smell of zombie?

Have no fear, there's a new solution to ease your woes!

Robot Blood Bowl Players!

Come on down to Scowl Worthleston and his Robot Dog Oil-Spot 's * Robot Emporium!

We'll set you up with a team for a fraction of the high gold prices those fragile meat sack players demand.
Commit to a baker's dozen and we'll throw in a free programmer's manual with time-tested plays like:

* Drive Shaft
* Down Shift
* Assembly Line
and many more.

We also offer maintenance and Baron Sheib paintjobs painting any robot any color for Fifty-nine-ninety-five.

So Come On Down!

* (wonder how many will get that reference)

..........................................

Finished another Blood Bowl team awhile back, and now that the client is back from vacation and seen & approved the team I can show it to all of you.

The team began with the client's concept of a Gnome & Robot team for an Ogre team: Robot Ogres & Gnome snotlings. But not Red Capped Garden Gnomes.. Steampunk gnomes. After a lot of searching and some suggestions, none of them really fit what he was after, so I suggested a gnome tinker's team, with all robots: Big & Small. he liked it, I liked it. Just had to find the robots. Here's what we have:

(click pictures for larger)

ROBOGRES:

An Ogre team can have up to 6 Ogres! So the team of course needs 6!

All of these are made from the same Privateer Press model, which because it sports a spear & shield is very static. So I tried to make a variety of poses, with a couple more static, and a few with more movement.

No Pose too dynamic and crazy though, I wanted to keep the feeling of heavy plodding weight, even when running. Their 'train cow-catcher' face grill seems especially appropriate now.
I'm happy with the differences in poses.

BOTLINGS:

These are *small*. Just right for strength 1 snotlings. These are 15mm robots from Khurusan.

I did a bit of converting: got rid of their wrist guns, sculpted shoulder pads and a couple got poses for running. It'd be quite easy to use these in 15mm sci-fi skirmish games..heck, the big robots could be used in sci-fi skirmish as well.

BASES:

These bases had a lot of thought put into them.

One of the problems with an Ogre team is that with 6 Ogres with 40mm bases it can get very tight on the board which has 29mm squares! They start pushing neighbors over lines and it can be a real mess.

So the large minis are on 35mm round bases (just big enough) and the little ones are 22mm round bases.

This means a small and a big can be next to each other and still fit in the space of 2 squares.

COACH:

From Reaper. He seemed just right to coach this team.

TOKENS:

Re-Roll tokens are the square piles of parts: Something went wrong? the robot likely needs a repair: slap some spare parts and try again!

Because the Robots are so large and placing them down on the pitch when knocked prone or stunned would be a problem, the team has 4 Privateer Press wreck markers: 2 for prone (their eye-lights are still on) 2 for stunned (no eye lights lit).

I am coming to the opinion that every team should have a Star Player or two ready to play on the team to consider the team 'complete'. If in a league, you may well need them! In a tournament, some encourage them or have such large team value allowed that you can find space for them and it can make a big change to how the team plays, adding a lot of life to playing the team time & again.

The Ogre team can have 3 different Ogre Stars: Mulg, Bertha, and Brick & Grotty. The last is actually 2 players for 1: an Ogre & his Goblin buddy. The nice thing about Robots is they could be any Ogre.. even a female, so the team just needs 1 Robot star and it could be any of the 3 as long as there is a goblin-robot too. So that's what we did.. just needed an even bigger and more dangerous looking robot...

ROBOT STARS:

He's so large he almost couldn't contain himself on the base.

This robot just screams 'blood bowl' to me.. all those spikes... just imagine having to saddle up to the line opposite this guy and told "don't let him through!" Yikes! Time to Retire!

Goblin Star.

Kind of makes me want to build a whole goblin-robot team! Hmmm...

And a line-up to see size differences:

The Whole Team: (click for larger)

The team now joins the others in the Hall of Fame, tab at the top of the blog.

I really enjoyed painting this team. I had a lot of fun working with metallics, keeping true colors to a minimum.. just a bit of near-white and green other than the ground. And of course the converting is always fun. I get attached to a lot of teams I make for clients, but this one I especially love.

Just something about robots. They'll be having fun tearing up the pitch in Austria...wish I could have gone with them.. lucky robots.